The Blade in the Fork in the Road

A few months ago, I confessed my odd obsession with forks -- and how a nice fork with the perfect taper and bend was a rare and beautiful thing.

Today, I noticed that good ol' Dave Moulton has a nice article about how forks are manipulated and bent by the framebilder. (Dave, like me, is not a fan of the straight blade. To my eye, a bike with a straight-blade fork is like a woman without hips; sort of boyish and unfinished looking. Check out some of Dave's beautiful forks, which I would rank right up at the top with my favorite Ciöcc and Cross-Check forks.)


So the question for Dave, which I hope he'll drop into the comments section as he does now and again, is this: Are fork forms constructed with a single brake point? Or are they themselves a curved form? I suspect they come in both flavors, because you see plenty of forks that seem to have not so much a tapering curve as a single change in angle -- truly an ugly thing, and just as repellent as a fork with too much rake.

The fork in the road

I'm certainly not an aesthete on the level of BikesnobNYC, but I have my little fetishes. If the straight chainline is the beaver shot of bike porn, then I have to confess I'm more of a fork guy. And being into the subtle femininity of the perfectly curved fork, there is very little of interest for me at fixedgeargallery, the cabbage patch where Bikesnob likes to take his weed-whacker.

See, track bike geometry and lines are pretty fucked up anyway, with all the silly bullhorn bars, deep V-rims, pads, and trashy spokecards. You'd think stripping a bike down to its bare essentials would innoculate you from making the most egregious mistakes in taste, but you'd be wrong, of course.

Anyway, my point was that standard track forks have carried forth a tradition of ugliness unequalled by anything in all of bikedom--except maybe seatbags, which hang grotesquely down like the testicles of a dirty old man in baggy gym shorts, completely destroying the clean lines of seat, post, and stay.

No matter how cool I'm told they are, flat fork-crowns only make me think of Moe Howard's fringe, and he was the cruelest Stooge.



And straight-blade forks are to bikes as skorts are to high fashion: an unfortunate but enduring mistake of judgment that corrects a problem that never existed (other than the problem of ugly forks).



It's possible that the straight-blade fork represents the industry just throwing in the towel, because so few have mastered the perfect marriage of rake and asymptote.

There is the late-breaking curve low in the legs that represents panic.



There is the prematurely-breaking curve followed by an embarrassed straight run to the dropouts.



There is the completely fubar geometry of the cane handle, that makes a bike look like a sort of medieval land-surveyor's device. Or one of those tools Egyptian morticians used to extract the brain through the nose of their mummies.



People, please pay attention to your forks. Would you pour a fine Shiraz into a dirty coffee mug? Would you eat Eppoise on a chicken-in-a-bisket? No, you wouldn't. Why attach a ridiculous and flawed fork to your otherwise lovely bike?

Let me now show you a few perfect forks. If you're a fork man like me, sit back and, you know, dim the lights. Leave the straight chainline folks to their coarse pleasures.

Namecheck: Minneapolis singletrack makes the Sunday Times, yo.

Thanks, Snakebite, for pointing us in the direction of this.

For the local crew, The Times travels to Minneapolis to sample Wirth singletrack -- and one Hurl Everstone shows them how it's done in the polished rock garden.

In the crisscrossing shadow of a rusty fence, Hurl Everstone, 39, a bike shop owner, spun through the rocky ramp, his front tire bouncing and weaving on the climb.

Which confirms what I've always felt: We're all the stars of own movie. But Hurl is the best supporting actor.